Today’s date is September 7, 2023. We are nearly a quarter of the way through the 21st Century. This was the century designed to propel humanity forward through the use of technology. As of September 7, 2023, we seem to be going backwards.
La promesa de la tecnología era ayudar a la humanidad a hacer las cosas simples más rápido. La introducción de la robótica en las líneas de montaje, por ejemplo, fue revolucionaria en la creación de cosas como los automóviles. Los teléfonos móviles trajeron las comunicaciones al mundo y, literalmente, hicieron el mundo más pequeño. Pero todas esas tecnologías surgieron a finales del siglo XX.
La tecnología siempre ha avanzado en torno a la idea del próximo "gran avance". En un momento dado, necesitabas la gran aplicación para revolucionar el mundo. Cosas como Pokémon Go ayudaron a la humanidad a moverse y caminar por un tiempo. La transmisión de medios a computadoras está cambiando la forma en que se crea el entretenimiento.
But has it helped at all? I can’t even get my cell phone to stop autocorrecting “get” to “grt.” I’ve gone into the settings of my phone. I’ve gone into the settings of the keyboard app. I’ve searched Reddit and Facebook and Google. And yet, every time my thumbs splay out “g e t” it immediately corrects it to “grt.” If I simply type in “grt” – it keeps it “grt.”
Esto me hizo detenerme, mirar a mi alrededor y preguntarme: ¿Esta basura realmente está mejorando nuestras vidas? Los niños y los adultos sufren literalmente síntomas relacionados con la adicción debido a su dependencia de las redes sociales. Las corporaciones comenzaron a utilizar cosas como mostradores de autopago que fueron diseñados para reducir las filas y mantener contentos a sus empleados. Entonces, ¿qué hicieron? Acaban de despedir a los empleados. Incluso cosas como la robótica están limitadas por sus programadores.
Another backslide with technology have been home assistants like Alexa and Google. Over the past six months, my Google Assistant has actually gotten dumber. It doesn’t recognize commands that it did this time last year. Additionally, other than set a cake timer, it’s not anything that ever evolved into something I want to use.
The folks who can really fix this? Well, as I’ve mentioned too often in this space over the past year. Those fellas are too busy building penis-shaped spaceships and planning boxing matches against each other.
Elon and Zuck and all the rest really used to walk-the-walk when it came to advancing humanity. The idea behind electric cars and conversion off of our dependence on fossil fuels is where this globe needs to go. But where are we, really? Tesla makes most of their money not from the sale of their cars, but by incentives paid by the government. Facebook basically tried to overthrow our government a few years ago and even Zuckerberg’s idea of a “metaverse” where we would all live has gone kaput.
In the meantime, I’ll still be sitting here waiting for technology to make my life easier other than being able to send dozens of emails a day only to get a hundred back in return. I’ll wait as climate change and fierce storms continue to batter cities around the globe. I’ll wait for someone not named Elon or Zuck to put something good into the world around technology. But most of all, I’ll wait for someone to grt my keyboard to grt the word grt changed to grt.
(Catch more from Chris Kamler on X–that’s the app formerly known as Twitter–where he is known as @TheFakeNed)